On the straight deck carrier, as opposed to the modern angled deck, there were frequent accidents on landing. These were usually due to pilot aberrations, too late for the LSO to detect and wave off. Being too fast at touchdown can cause the plane to bounce and the hook to skip the arresting wires. That’s where the barriers come into play. As their name implies, the barriers prevent a plane, which failed to catch a wire for any reason — poor landing, broken hook, or a parted crossdeck cable — from plowing into the pack.
Easing power in the groove (the final straightaway) in an effort to reduce speed, can cause the plane to sink and strike the rounddown, the aft end of the flight deck. This normally resulted in the plane breaking in half aft of the cockpit and the two pieces of the fuselage tumbling down the deck in flames at better than one hundred miles per hour.
During World War II, there was a single type of deck barrier, a simple arrangement of wires that engaged the plane’s prop to stop the aircraft in a matter of feet with little damage. A propeller change would usually have the aircraft back on the flight schedule in a day. The prop type barrier would stop a jet aircraft, but not without major structural damage. A new type barrier had to be designed and installed. The barrier operator in the flight-deck catwalk was responsible for raising the correct barrier for the type of aircraft about to land. This was always a potential hazard, but very few errors were made by the deck-edge flight deck crew in selecting the wrong barrier.
Then another jet-induced problem arose, a new kind of carrier landing accident with catastrophic consequences. When a prop pilot cut his power on the signal from the LSO, the aircraft literally stalled. It quit flying and glided to the deck to stay and simply rolled forward. Fully retarding the throttle on a jet, however, reduces the engine power slowly as the turbine has to unwind. The jet is still flying and the pilot must fly it onto the deck and hold it down as it rolls ahead. With their high landing-approach speeds, up to forty knots higher than the prop planes, a jet on a bad landing could bounce over the jet barriers and plunge into the pack at more than one hundred knots, tearing through the parked planes and servicing crews. The presence of high-octane gasoline being pumped under pressure and live ammunition exposed on deck and on the aircraft was guaranteed to set off explosions, and fires would spread quickly through the pack.
By 1950, after several years of jet carrier operations with fleet units, there had been enough of these incidents that a third barrier was added to the carrier’s flight deck just forward of the first two. This was called the “barricade” but referred to by the crew as the “tennis net.” It consisted of a taut wire rigged about eighteen feet high across the deck, with heavy nylon straps attached to a parallel wire cable at deck level. The crashing jet would poke its nose between the vertical nylon straps and be arrested as the straps engaged the jet’s wings. It stopped the runaway jets with little damage to the aircraft. But in an accident when a Banshee jet engaged the barricade, the vertical straps pulled the top wire into the cockpit, killing the pilot. So all jets from then on landed on board the carrier with the cockpit canopy closed.
The Navy moved with alacrity to backfit all of the fleet carriers with the barricade. I was flying in Fighter Squadron 111 in the Valley Forge during its first Korean War deployment. The Valley Force had no barricade installed. So en route to Korea in November 1951, the carrier was diverted to the naval base at Yokosuka. A crew of more than one hundred Japanese shipyard workers (who had worked on the carriers of the Imperial Japanese navy in World War II) accomplished the installation of the barricade under the supervision of U.S. Navy engineers and technicians flown out from the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst, New Jersey, in two days. Under normal conditions in a U.S. shipyard we would have been tied up for at least a week.
Unfortunately, there were still occasions when planes actually bounced — or flew — over this barricade to crash on deck. In 1953, in preparation for deploying to Korea on board the USS Boxer, a replacement pilot in Fighter Squadron 52, of which I was then executive officer, went out of control on touchdown, bounced over the barricade, and crashed his F9F-2 Panther on the forward flight deck. The pilot was a lieutenant and had flown prop fighters from carriers in World War II. He had been recalled from the Reserves for active duty in Korea.
CATAPULTS
A second major change in carrier operations in the Korean War was also the result of the addition of jets to the air group. In World War II, almost the entire air group could become airborne during the launch cycle by taking off from the flight deck under their own power. The carrier would turn into the wind and make the speed necessary to create a relative wind of thirty to thirty-five knots over the deck. This was enough to allow the propeller aircraft to take off with a full load of fuel and ordnance under the power of their own engines.
With jet aircraft this was not possible. Jets accelerate more slowly and can not attain flying speed without the additional push provided by a catapult. Deck launching for the early carrier jets with a combat load was not feasible, even if the full length of the flight deck could be made available. So all of the jet squadrons in the carrier air wing had to rely on catapulting. The Essex-class carrier had two catapults mounted in the forward flight deck all the way forward. These monsters used a hydraulic-powered piston to move a shuttle along a track in the flight deck through a system of cables and pulleys. There were several different models in the carrier fleet, the more improved version being longer as well as more powerful. The catapult had to accelerate ten tons or more of aircraft from a standstill to one hundred knots in a distance of a hundred feet.
Catapulting demanded a careful line-up and hook-up of the aircraft to the shuttle, and this required forty-five seconds to more than a minute, depending on the experience of the pilots, the proficiency of the catapult crews, and the type of aircraft. With two catapults, this meant a carrier launch rate of one plane every half minute. A deck launch could put a prop plane in the air every ten seconds.
As the case in all mechanical devices, catapults could break down. With one catapult out of commission, the carrier’s launch rate for jets was cut in half. If both cats went down, the jet squadrons were grounded. The care and maintenance of cats was a high priority on board the carrier. The catapult maintenance crews on board were kept fully up to their authorized manning level and well supplied with spare parts. A catapult was seldom out of commission for more than one launch and recovery cycle. If a catapult developed a serious problem, expert assistance was available. The Navy maintained a special troubleshooting and repair team of civil service technicians on both coasts and in Japan. These teams were ready to fly out in six to twelve hours to any carrier anywhere in the world. It was very seldom that an operating carrier would ever have all of its cats (in later years carriers had three and four catapults) out of commission at one time.
This emphasis on the reliability of the carrier’s catapults was rough on the cat crews. Their only time for tear-down, inspection, and preventive maintenance of the machinery was in port, when no air operations were scheduled. Port visits for a deployed, operating carrier were never more than ten days, and the cat crews seldom got more than a day or two of liberty during a port visit.
Pilots were concerned about the catapults. A pilot put his life in the hands of the catapult operator and maintenance crews. If the catapult didn’t work properly, the result was a fatal accident. In the early days of the Korean War, with the tremendous expansion of the jet-capable carrier force from ten ships to nineteen in three years, experience levels dropped dangerously low at times for some ships. The catapult operator at the deck-edge control panel was usually a nineteen-year-old third-class petty officer. Although bright and fully aware of his critical responsibility, he was exposed to the weather elements and jet blast, and with the noise and continually changing situation before him on the flight deck, he could become rattled and misread hand signals. Modern carriers have an enclosed catapult control station in the middle of the forward flight deck, and all catapult crew members have short-range radio receivers with earphones built into their flight deck helmets, referred to as the “mickey mouse” because of the big earphones.